Leia > Recent Status Updates

I suppose the root of the resentment - a resentment which hides a bottomless terror - has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her - literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s.

hm

I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the lughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

a standard imperialist misrepresentation has it that exclusively Western ideas of freedom led the fight against the colonial rule, which mischievously overlooks the reserves in Indian and Arab culture that always resisted imperialism, and claims the fight against imperialism as one of imperialism’s major triumphs

Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has been displaced by the consumer.

Students are aware that if they don’t attend for weeks on end, and/or if they don’t produce any work, they will not face any meaningful sanction. They typically respond to this freedom not by pursuing projects but by falling into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstaion, all-night TV and marijuana.

Capitalist ideology in general, Zizek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.

Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for jothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.

You have such a delicious sense of humor — I adore that in you. I want always to see you laughing. It belongs to you.

He said I could only write like that, with imaginative intensity, because I had not lived out what I was writing about, that the living-out kills the imagination and the intensity, as happens to him.

Besides, being intelligent, he understands that my type can’t be ‘made’ without the illusion. He cannot bother with illusions. O.K. He is a little angry, but… he’ll make a story out of it. He is amused because I tell him I know he doesn’t love me. He thought I might be childish enough to believe that he did. ‘Bright kid,’ he says. And he tells me all his troubles.

“I can’t find the words, but… Aglaia Ivanovna will understand! Oh, I’ve always believed that she would understand.”
“No, prince, she won’t understand. Aglaia Ivanovna loved you like a woman, like a human being, not like an abstract spirit. Do you know what, my poor prince, the most likely thing is that you’ve never loved either of them!”

awwwwww. duuuude. dude

ah fuck

But I haven’t slept all night. I walked and walked afterwards. I’ve been where the music was.

Can anything that has no shape appear in a shape? But I seemed to fancy at times that I saw in some strange, incredible form that infinite Power, that dull, dark, dumb force. I remember that some one seemed to lead me by the hand, holding a candle, to show me a huge and loathsome spider, and to assure me, laughing at my indignation, that this was that same dark, dumb and almighty Power.

oh jesus. i think i’m rogozhin

Of course, you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you’ve lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. - You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool.

quoting susan sontag:
Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for the masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images.

He says, sometimes you say things before you’ve understood them yourself. For you the saying is a kind of working out, he says, like doing a sum on a bit of paper. You can’t always expect people to grasp it. But I want you to know what I mean, I say. So do I, he says. I want to know what you mean.
It’s late at night, too late to run away from something whose nature I can’t in any case discern.

‘Having it all,’ like any form of success, requires hard work. It requires an adoption of the heroic mode of being. But the hero is solitary, forever searching out the holy grail, her belief that she is exceptional perhaps only a disguise for the fact that she is essentially alone.

Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. “These wolves seem upset at something,” he observed. The next morning the cage was all twisted out of shape and the gray wolf Berserker was missing. Dracula had temporarily inhabited its body. Dracula had a totally different experience at the zoo from that of other people.

Before that summer, I knew almost nothing about the Beatles. I didn’t know why it was important to be a mop-top, or what a mop-top was. Whenever I heard older people talking about them, I just tuned it out. There were never any bad consequences. I really thought I could go through my whole life that way. But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.

He said we had to start calling it just “Ukraine,” without the definite article, because in Russian “Ukraine” meant “borderland,” and to call a whole country “The Borderland” was insulting. Apparently if you called it simply “Borderland,” people would think it was a proper name, semantically unrelated to its other instances.

We waded into the pond. Translucent minnows circled our ankles. They were so alive. It was almost pure life in those little bodies, there was so little room for anything else. The sun was low and there was a breeze. The water felt ice-cold. I felt paralyzed by the thought of going in. Then I resolved myself and dove under.

I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn’t think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read

I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did—someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity. I was wrong; it was more a book about interior decoration.

I was thinking about the equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.